Wednesday, October 9, 2013

1.The Demise of the IPCC and the CAGW Delusion.a) Overview.
In the AR5 Summary for Policymakers the IPCC glossed over the developing cooling trend in global temperatures and so lost the last vestige of its scientific credibility and any claim to be a source of useful guidance on future climate trends for policymakers.
The IPCC's remit was never to study climate objectively but to support the proposition that anthropogenic CO2 was the main climate driver and that increasing emissions would produce warming with catastrophic consequences by the end of the 21st century. To their eternal discredit too many of the Western scientific establishment abandoned common sense and scientific standards of objectivity and prudence in order to accommodate their paymasters.
The entire vast UN and Government sponsored AGW behemoth with its endless labyrinthine conferences and gigantic schemes for UN global control over the World and National economies is a prime example of the disasters Eisenhower warned against in 1961 he said :
"In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite. "

Politicians were willing to forgo the trouble of thinking for themselves and forming their own commonsense views on climate so long as their paid scientists gave them scary forecasts to use to grab power and control over economic activity. This sinister symbiotic relationship enabled politicians to reward themselves ,their political friends and corporate sponsors while at the same time feeling righteous about "saving the world" Thus, with the enthusiastic assistance of the eco-left anti -capitalist movement and a supine or agenda driven MSM the CAGW delusion took over much of the Western world as a quasi religion which will not easily fade away even though, as the AR5 science section shows, it has no connection to reality.

b) What's wrong with the science?
The CAGW meme is built on the outputs of climate models. Many of the modelers and IPCC and Met Office scientific chiefs had a background in weather forecasting In spite of the inability of the weather models to forecast more than about 10 days ahead, in an act of almost unbelievable hubris and stupidity, the modelers allowed themselves to believe, or at least proclaim, that they knew enough about the physical processes and climate driving factors involved to forecast global temperatures for decades and centuries ahead.Indeed, many establishment scientists appear to think that humanity can dial up a desired global temperature by keeping CO2 within some appropriate limit. What arrant nonsense!
In practice the modelers have known for some time that their models have no skill in forecasting and have indeed said so in the WG1 reports. The IPCC AR4 WG1 science section actually acknowledges this fact. Section IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which deals with the reliability of the projections. It concludes:
"Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections, consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed"
What could be clearer. The IPCC in 2007 said itself that we don't even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability.- i.e. we don't know what future temperatures will be and we can't calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2.This also begs a further question of what erroneous assumptions (e.g. that CO2 is the main climate driver) went into the "plausible" models to be tested anyway. This means that the successive SPM uncertainty estimates take no account of the structural uncertainties in the models and that almost the entire the range of model outputs may well lay outside the range of the real world future climate variability. By the time of the AR5 report this is obviously the case. Here are two examples

Fig1, (IPCC Fig 1.4 2nd Draft)

Fig 2

The key factor in making CO2 emission control policy is the climate sensitivity to CO2 . By AR5 - WG1 the IPCC is saying: (Section 9.7.3.3)

"The assessed literature suggests that the range of climate sensitivities and transient responses covered by CMIP3/5 cannot be narrowed significantly by constraining the models with observations of the mean climate and variability, consistent with the difficulty of constraining the cloud feedbacks from observations "

In plain English this means that they have no idea what the climate sensitivity is and that therefore that the politicians have no empirical scientific basis for their economically destructive climate and energy policies.

In summary the projections of the IPCC - Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them are based on specifically structurally flawed and inherently useless models. They deserve no place in any serious discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a basis for public policy their forecasts are grossly in error and therefore worse than useless.

2. A Simple Rational Approach to Climate Forecasting based on Common Sense and Quasi Repetitive- Quasi Cyclic Patterns. How then can we predict the future of a constantly changing climate? A new forecasting paradigm is required .

It is important to note that it in order to make transparent and likely skillful forecasts it is not necessary to understand or quantify the interactions of the large number of interacting and quasi independent physical processes and variables which produce the state of the climate system as a whole as represented by the temperature metric.

When, about ten years ago ,I began to look into the CAGW - CO2 based scare, some simple observations immediately presented themselves.a) Night is colder than day.b) Winter is colder than summer.c) It is cooler in the shade and under clouds than in the sund) Temperatures vary more widely in deserts and hot humid days are more uncomfortable than dry hot days - humidity (enthalpy) might be an important factor. We use Sun Screen against UV rays - can this be a clue?e) Being a Geologist I knew that the various Milankovitch cycles were seen repeatedly in the Geologic record and were the main climate drivers controlling the Quaternary Ice Ages.f) I also considered whether the current climate was unusually hot or cold. Some modest knowledge of history brought to mind frost fairs on the Thames and the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum without sunspots during the 17th century . The 300 years of Viking settlements in Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period and viniculture in Britain suggested a warmer world in earlier times than at present while the colder Dark Ages separate the MWP from the Roman Climate optimum.g) I noted that CO2 was about 0.0375% of the Atmosphere and thought ,correctly as it turns out, that it was highly unlikely that such a little tail should wag such a big dog.I concluded ,as might any person of reasonable common sense and average intelligence given these simple observations that solar activity and our orbital relations to the sun were the main climate drivers. More specific temperature drivers were the number of hours of sunshine, the amount of cloud cover, the humidity and the height of the sun in the sky at midday and at Midsummer . It seemed that the present day was likely not much or very little outside the range of climate variability for the last 2000 years and that no government action or policy was required or would be useful with regard to postulated anthropogenic CO2 driven climate change.

These conclusions based on about 15 minutes of anyone's considered thought are, at once , much nearer the truth and certainly would be much more useful as a Guide to Policymakers than the output of the millions of man hours of time and effort that have been spent on IPCC - Met Office models and the Global Warming impact studies and the emission control policies based on them. However it is necessary ,of course, to go beyond this level of understanding.

Over the last 25 years an immense amount of valuable instrumental and proxy temperature and possible climate driver data has been acquired and it turns out that climate forecasting on the basis of recognizing quasi cyclic - quasi-repetitive patterns in that data is fairly simple and straight forward. Interested parties should take the time necessary to become familiar with the general trends in both the instrumental and proxy time series of temperature ,forcings and feedbacks.Central to any forecast of future cooling is some knowledge of the most important reconstructions of past temperatures after all the infamous hockey stick was instrumental in selling the CAGW meme.

and another showing clearly the correlation of the various climate minima over the last 1000 years to cosmic ray intensities -( note especially Fig 8 C ,D below ) is: Steinhilber et al - 9400 years of cosmic radiation and solar activity from ice cores and tree rings:http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/30/1118965109.full.pdf

A review of candidate proxy data reconstructions and the historical record of climate during the last 2000 years suggests that at this time the most useful reconstruction for identifying temperature trends in the latest important millennial cycle is that of Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012 (Fig 5)http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf

s

Fig.3

The shape of the curve of Fig 3(Fig 5 Christiansen) from 1000 - the present should replace the Mann-IPCC hockey stick in the public consciousness as the icon for climate change and a guide to the future i.e. the temperature trends from 1000- 2000 will essentially repeat from 2000- 3000.

The recurring millennial cycle is also seen in the ice core data.

Fig.4

For forecasts on decadal scales the 60 year PDO cycle is clearly useful. It is generally accepted that it recently shifted from warm mode to a cool mode which should last about thirty years.

The simplest working hypothesis for forecasting future climate is that the change in the temperature trend from warming to cooling in 2003 (Figs 6 and 7) marked both the change in the PDO phase and the peak in the 1000 year cycle.

NOTE !! the connection between solar "activity" and climate is poorly understood and highly controversial. Solar " activity" encompasses changes in solar magnetic field strength, IMF, CRF, TSI ,EUV,solar wind density and velocity, CMEs, proton events etc. The idea of using the neutron count as a useful proxy for changing solar activity and temperature forecasting is agnostic as to the physical mechanisms involved.

Fig.8

The trends in the neutron count over the last few solar cycles strengthens the forecast of coming cooling made from projecting the PDO and Millennial cycle temperature trends.The decline in solar activity from 1990 (Cycle 22) to the present (Cycle 24) is obvious.

Fig.9

It has been estimated that there is about a 12 year lag between the cosmic ray flux and the temperature data. see Fig3 in Usoskin et alhttp://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2005ESASP.560...19U.
With that in mind it is reasonable to correlate the cycle 22 low in the neutron count (high solar activity and SSN) with the peak in the SST trend in about 2003 and project forward the possible general temperature decline in the coming decades in step with the decline in solar activity in cycles 23 and 24.
In earlier posts on this site http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com at 4/02/13 and 1/22/13
I have combined the PDO, ,Millennial cycle and neutron trends to estimate the timing and extent of the coming cooling in both the Northern Hemisphere and Globally.

Here are the conclusions of those posts.

1/22/13 (NH)

1) The millennial peak is sharp - perhaps 18 years +/-. We have now had 16 years since 1997 with no net warming - and so might expect a sharp drop in a year or two - 2014/16 -with a net cooling by 2035 of about 0.35.Within that time frame however there could well be some exceptional years with NH temperatures +/- 0.25 degrees colder than that.
2) The cooling gradient might be fairly steep down to the Oort minimum equivalent which would occur about 2100. (about 1100 on Fig 5) ( Fig 3 here) with a total cooling in 2100 from the present estimated at about 1.2 +/-
3) From 2100 on through the Wolf and Sporer minima equivalents with intervening highs to the Maunder Minimum equivalent which could occur from about 2600 - 2700 a further net cooling of about 0.7 degrees could occur for a total drop of 1.9 +/- degrees
4)The time frame for the significant cooling in 2014 - 16 is strengthened by recent developments already seen in solar activity. With a time lag of about 12 years between the solar driver proxy and climate we should see the effects of the sharp drop in the Ap Index which took place in 2004/5 in 2016-17.

4/02/13 ( Global)

1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17 2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22 3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024 4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 - 0.15 5 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 - 0.5 6 General Conclusion - by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed, 7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age. 8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial - they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields . 9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the MaunderMinimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent - with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.

How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method doesn't lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigor for the uninitiated and in relation to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up.This is where scientific judgment comes in - some people are better at pattern recognition and meaningful correlation than others. A past record of successful forecasting such as indicated above is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure - say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that certainty drops rapidly. I am sure, however, that it will prove closer to reality than anything put out by the IPCC, Met Office or the NASA group. In any case this is a Bayesian type forecast- in that it can easily be amended on an ongoing basis as the Temperature and Solar data accumulate. If there is not a 0.15 - 0.20. drop in Global SSTs by 2018 -20 I would need to re-evaluate.
.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

1. Original Forecast v Reality.
In the last few months there have been numerous discussions on the WUWT site and amongst establishment scientists questioning the validity of climate models as a source of useful predictions about future temperature trends.Notably, the UK Met Office has reported on "The Recent Pause in Global Warming" for which they have no good explanation.The fact is that,as will be discussed later, their models are incorrectly structured and the modelling approach is inherently useless for making predictions.A much better approach is to recognise and project forward quasi-cyclic quasi-repetitive patterns in the temperature, oceanic systems and solar driver data as was done in the 30 year forecast reviewed here.
Here are extracts from the original (6/18/10) 30 Year Forecast and the 2012 update which readers can check against the last 3 years of data and their own experience.

6/18/10
"The geologic record shows clearly that the sun is the main climate driver. The Milankovitch multi-millennial orbital cycles in NH insolation are firmly established in the record as are the Schwab and deVries cycles. Other millennial and decadal variations in solar activity are present in the record. TSI is not the only or even the best indicator of solar activity – variations in EUV radiation and the GCR flux (via cloud formation and earth’s albedo) seem to be more important on decadal and centennial scales . Earth’s climate is the result of complex resonances between all these solar cycles with the lunar declination cycles and endogenous earth processes.
At this time the sun has entered a quiet phase with a dramatic drop in solar magnetic field strength since 2004. This suggests the likelihood of a cooling phase on earth with Solar Cycles 21, 22 ,23 equivalent to Solar Cycles 2,3,4, and the delayed Cycle 24 comparable with Cycle 5 so that a Dalton type minimum is probable ". ..............................
"There will be a steeper temperature gradient from the tropics to the poles so that violent thunderstorms with associated flooding and tornadoes will be more frequent in the USA, At the same time the jet stream will swing more sharply North – South thus local weather in the Northern hemisphere in particular will be generally more variable with occasional more northerly heat waves and more southerly unusually cold snaps. In the USA hurricanes may strike the east coast with greater frequency in summer and storm related blizzards more common in winter.
The southern continents will be generally cooler with more frequent droughts and frost and snow in winter,
Arctic and Antarctic sea ice may react differentially to an average global cooling. We might expect sea ice to increase in the Antarctic but in the NH the Arctic Oscillation while bringing cooler temperatures further south may also occasionaly bring warmer air into the Arctic with possible relative loss of sea ice in that area during those years"

Here is an excerpt from the 2 year update posted on this site http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
on
7/19/12
"The original Forecast was posted on 6/18/2010. Two more years of Termperature, Ocean Current patterns, and Solar, and "weather" data have considerably confirmed and strengthened the original forecast....
In brief - NOAA - HCN - SSTs show that warming peaked in 2003 and there has now been no net warming since 1997 - 15 years with no net warming and CO2 up 8.2%. Since 2003 the global temperature trend is slightly negative. The PDO remains in its negative phase while the solar magnetic field strength continues an inexorable decline ,which is looking more and more likely to be a precursor of a Maunder type minimum. Sunspot data and the relatively high GCR count for this stage in solar cycle 24 confirm the secular change in solar activity relative to the previous century.
Meanwhile the weather patterns - particularly in the US and Europe - have been as forecast in the earlier post. ."...................
"The general conclusions of the original post are confirmed ..........
All the recent empirical data - especially the negative phase of the PDO and the continued decline in the Solar magnetic field strength now ( July 2012) suggest that once solar cycle 24 starts its decline in 2014-15 we will see an acceleration of the current slight cooling trend and that this trend might well last for 25 -30 years. Beyond then we do not know enough at this time to make useful predictions"

Readers might note that I think of the thirty year forecast as starting from the warming peak in 2003.
Since June of 2012 the data now (7/25/13) further confirms the continuation of the main forecast temperature trend and also the decline in solar activity relative to earlier twentieth century solar cycles.(Figs 1 and 2)

For reasons discussed in several earlier posts I use the SST data as the best metric for climate change and the Oulu neutron count as the most useful proxy measure of solar activity.

Fig 1

Trend hadsst3 2003- 2013(thru June)

We have now had an eleven year cooling trend during which CO2 has continued to rise steadily - about 19 ppm in total.

The unprecedentedly high neutron count (GCR and solar activity proxy) as the Solar Cycle 24 maximum is approached compared with earlier cycles and the unprecedented count peak durimg the 23/24 minimum in late 2009 are the main indicators suggesting the continuation and possible deepening of the cooling trend in the coming decades.In addition the Livingston and Penn solar data point in the direction of the possible approach of a Maunder Minimum.

Fig 2

2.How Not to Do and How to Do Climate Science.
During the last twelve months I have laid out ,in a series of posts on this site, a review of the basic climate data and of methods used in climate prediction and from these have developed a simple transparent forecast of future cooling. For details see the pertinent posts listed below.
7/19/12 30 Year Climate Forecast -2 year Update
10/30/12. Hurricane Sandy-Extreme Events and Global Cooling
11/18/12 Global Cooling Climate and Weather Forecasting
1/22/13 Global Cooling Timing and Amount
2/18/13 Its the Sun Stupid - the Minor Significance of CO2
4/2/13 Global Cooling Methods and Testable Decadal Predictions.
5/14/13 Climate Forecasting for Britains Seven Alarmist Scientists and for UK Politicians.

The most important points are summarised below.

a) Total Collapse of the IPCC - Met Office Modelling Approach - How Not To Do Climate Science.
The inadequacy, not to say inanity, of the climate models can be seen by simple inspection of the following Figure 2-20 from the AR4 WG1 report.

Fig.3

The only natural forcing is TSI and everything else is classed as anthropogenic. The glaring deficiency of this model structure is immediately obvious. Under natural should come such things as eg Milankovitch Orbital Cycles,Lunar related tidal effects on ocean currents,Earths geomagnetic field strength and all the Solar Activity data time series - eg Solar Magnetic Sield strength, TSI ,SSNs ,GCRs ,( effect on aerosols,clouds and albedo) CHs, MCEs, EUV variations, and associated ozone variations and Forbush events. Unless the range and causes of natural variation are known within reasonably narrow limits it is simply not possible to calculate the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on climate.

The results of this gross error of scientific judgement ,not to say lack of simple common sense,is seen in the growing discrepancy between global temperature trends and the model projections - see this example from Spencer.

Fig 4

This disconnect has been acknowledged by the establishment science community which is now busy suggesting various epicycle like theories as to where the "missing" heat went.Some say its in the oceans (Trenberth) some say its due to Chinese aerosols (Hansen) but the all main actors still persist in the view that it will appear Lazarus like at some unspecified future time.This is like the Jehovah's witnesses recalculating the end of the world each time a specified doomsday passes.
In Britain , the gulf between the Met Office expectations for the last several years and the actual string of cold and snowy winters and wet summers which has occurred has made the Met Office a laughing stock-to the point of recently holding a meeting of 25 "experts" to try to figure out where they went wrong.The answer is simple.Their climate models are incorrectly structured because they are based on three irrational and false assumptions. First that CO2 is the main climate driver ,second that in calculating climate sensitivity the GHE due to water vapour should be added to that of CO2 as a feed back effect and third that the GHE of water vapour is always positive.As to the last point the feedbacks cannot be positive otherwise we wouldn't be here to talk about it .
Temperature drives both CO2 and water vapour independently,. The whole CAGW - GHG scare is based on the obvious fallacy of putting the effect before the cause.As a simple (not exact) analogy controlling CO2 levels to control temperature is like trying to lower the temperature of an electric hot plate under a boiling pan of water by capturing and sequestering the steam coming off the top.A corollory to this idea is that the whole idea of a simple climate sensitivity to CO2 is nonsense and the sensitivity equation has no physical meaning unless you already know what the natural controls on energy inputs are already ie the extent of the natural variability.
Furthermore the modelling approach is inherently of no value for predicting future temperature with any calculable certainty because of the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions of a large number of variables with sufficient precision prior to multiple iterations. There is no way of knowing whether the outputs after the parameterisation of the multiple inputs merely hide compensating errors in the system as a whole. The IPCC AR4 WG1 science section actually acknowledges this fact. Section IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which deals with the reliability of the projections.It concludes:
"Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections,consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed"
What could be clearer. The IPCC in 2007 said itself that we don't even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability.- ie we don't know what future temperatures will be and we can't calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2.This also begs a further question of what mere assumptions went into the "plausible" models to be tested anyway. In summary the projections of the IPCC - Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them are based on specifically structurally flawed and inherently useless models.They deserve no place in any serious discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money.As a basis for public policy their forecasts are grossly in error and therefore worse than useless.

b) A Simple Rational Approach to Climate Forecasting based on Common Sense and Quasi Repetitive- Quasi Cyclic Patterns.

How then can we predict the future of a constantly changing climate?

When,about ten years ago ,I began to look into the CAGW - CO2 based scare, some simple observations immediately presented themselves.These seem to have escaped the notice of the Climate Establishment. ( See the Post 5/14/13 Climate Forecasting for Britains Seven Alarmist Scientists and for UK Politicians.)
a) Night is colder than day.
b) Winter is colder than summer.
c) It is cooler in the shade and under clouds than in the sun
d) Temperatures vary more widely in deserts and hot humid days are more uncomfortable than dry hot days - humidity (enthalpy) might be an important factor. We use Sun Screen against UV rays - can this be a clue?
e) Being a Geologist I knew that the various Milankovitch cycles were seen repeatedly in the Geologic record and were the main climate drivers controlling the Quaternary Ice Ages.
f) I also considered whether the current climate was unusually hot or cold. Some modest knowledge of history brought to mind frost fairs on the Thames and the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum without sunspots during the 17th century . The 300 years of Viking settlements in Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period and viniculture in Britain suggested a warmer world in earlier times than at present while the colder Dark Ages separate the MWP from the Roman Climate optimum.
g) I noted that CO2 was about 0.0375% of the Atmosphere and thought ,correctly as it turns out, that it was highly unlikely that such a little tail should wag such a big dog.
I concluded ,as might any person of reasonable common sense and average intelligence given these simple observations that solar activity and our orbital relations to the sun were the main climate drivers. More specific temperature drivers were the number of hours of sunshine,the amount of cloud cover,the humidity and the height of the sun in the sky at midday and at Midsummer . It seemed that the present day was likely not much or very little outside the range of climate variability for the last 2000 years and that no government action or policy was required or would be useful with regard to postulated anthropogenic CO2 driven climate change.

These conclusions based on about 15 minutes of anyone's considered thought are,at once , much nearer the truth and certainly would be much more useful as a Guide to Policymakers than the output of the millions of man hours of time and effort that have been spent on IPCC - Met Office models and the Global Warming impact studies and the emission control policies based on them.

The IPCC and Met Office "team" realised correctly that in order to predict the future they needed a good record of past temperatures- certainly over at least the last 2000 years or so and as much further back as proxy data would allow.Also in order to scare the public and drive policy it was necessary to show that current warm temperatures were out of the range of previous measurements. First they had to do away with Lamb's (and the real world's) Medieval Warming Period which appeared in the first IPCC report. In 1998 and 99 Mann produced the infamous" Hockey Stick" so beloved and exploited by Al Gore. The establishment modelling community,most politicians and the ecoleft MSM implicitly or explicitly still appear conceptually locked in to the original Mannian graph although he himself has moved on to a limited extent...A large amount of extremely valuable work has been done in gathering proxy temperature data in the last 15 years. Links to some of the most relevant papers are provided athttp://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/01/global-cooling-timing-and-amountnh.html

One method of investigationg climate change is to perfom spectral and wavelet analysis on the temperature and any possibly useful driver associated time series to find any quasi-cyclic quasi-repetitive patterns which can be projected forwards - but it is not even that difficult. It turns out, on reflection perhaps not surprisingly, that simple inspection of the temperature and ocean system data is sufficient to detect useful quasi-periodicities which probably embrace the greater part of the changing climate signal.Furthermore,although it is obviously ultimately highly scientifically desirable, it is not necessary to understand exactly how the system works to be able to make useful forecasts.
For decadal scale variations an approximate 60 year cycle which seems to correlate temperatures and the PDO is well established in the temperature data and in the record of the PDO.

Easterbrook says:
"The recent shift from PDO warm mode to cool mode is similar to the shift that occurred in the mid-1940′s and resulted in 30 years of global cooling (Fig. 4). The global warming from ~1915 to ~1945 was also brought on by a mode shift in the PDO (Fig. 4). Every indication points to continuation of the PDO patterns of the past century and global cooling for the next 30 years (Fig. 4). Thus, the global warming the Earth has experienced since 1977 appears to be over."

For multidecadal and centennial predictions we need to know where we are relative to the appriximately millenial cycle seen in the ice core and proxy temperature reconstructions.

Fig 6 . Gisp2 Temps and Epica CO2.

The millenial spacing of the temperature peaks over the last 2000 years is clearly seen in the Gisp2 ice core data Fig 6. Incidentally, the CAGW fraternity might note that this Figure also indicates the total disconnect between the general trends of CO2 and Temperature over the last 8000 years.
For forecasting purposes it is perfectly reasonable to assume from Figures 5,6 and 7 as a conservative working hypothesis that the temperature peak at about 2003 was a peak in both the 60 year and the Millennial cycles and estimate the future cooling trend on that basis .
If the millennial trend is about to repeat, a view of what is ahead is provided by looking at the temperature trend over the past thousand years. A review of candidate proxy data reconstructions and the written record of climate during that time suggests that at this time the most useful reconstruction is that of Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012 (Fig 5)http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf

Fig 7

The shape of the curve of Fig 7(Fig 5) from 1000 - the present should replace the Mann-IPCC hockey stick in the public conciousness as the icon for climate change and a guide to the future.
The simplest assumption for temperature trends to be expected following the current peak is that the downslope
to about 2650 AD may well look like the general downslope from 1000 to1650.Naturally,
predictions beyond the 30 years which coincides with a PDO declining temperature
trend would be increasingly more speculative.
Using the HADSST 3 Global data as a
more detaled mirror image template for the coming centuury (Fig 8) produces the following estimates .

The rising trend peaks out at 2003-5 Fig2..A rise occurred from 1975 - 2003-5.
We might therefore look for a similar cooling from 2005 to 2035 The average
peak temperature has an Hadsst 3 anomaly of about +0.38 . The rise from 1975
was from about -0.15 to +0.38 = +0.53 . and thus we might look for a similar
decline in global SSTs temperatures to - 0.15 by 2035. This would coincide well
with the current 30 year cooling phase of the PDO. More speculatively we might
similarly estimate a recovery to + 0.1 by about 2060 followed by further
Global cooling to - 0.5 by 2100 - equivalent to the 1910 temperature.These numbers apply to the 5 year moving average- the range in variability can be seen in Fig 7

These forecasts and trends are generally consistent with the broad trends in
the Oulu neutron count since 1964 -see Fig2 above. It seems that there
is likely a +/- 12 year lag between the neutron count and the SST data.. see Fig3 in Usoskin
et alhttp://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2005ESASP.560...19U

The decline in the count minima from solar cycles 20 -22 ie from 1969 -
1991 corresponds roughly to the temperature rise from the early 1980s to the
2003-5 temperature peak . It also matches well with the increase in the count of
hours of sunshine during the same period dicussed by Wang et al http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/9581/2012/acp-12-9581-2012.pdf
which
may well represent an open phase of the iris effect.
The relatively
higher counts at the cycle 23 and especially the cycle 24 neutron minima troughs
(solar cycle SSN peaks) suggest a continuing downtrend in temperatures to at
least 2024.
There was a secular change in the related Ap index in 2004-5
which could presage a sharp temperature drop in about 2016-17 . The Oulu data
show an increase in the neutron count also in 2004- 5 which might indicate
the same thing and which is already built in to the system.
Furthermore it is clear that the cosmic ray intensity time series reflected in the 10Be data is the best proxy for "solar activity "and that this correlates meaningfully with temperature-see Fig 3 CD from Steinhilber http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/30/1118965109.full.pdf

Fig 9

To summarize- Using the 60 and 1000 year quasi repetitive patterns in conjunction with the solar data leads straightforwardly to the following reasonable predictions for Global SSTs

1 Continued modest cooling until a more significant temperature drop at about 2016-172 Possible unusual cold snap
2021-223 Built in cooling trend until at least 20244 Temperature Hadsst3
moving average anomaly 2035 - 0.155Temperature Hadsst3 moving average
anomaly 2100 - 0.56 General Conclusion - by 2100 all the 20th century
temperature rise will have been reversed,7 By 2650 earth could possibly be
back to the depths of the little ice age.8 The effect of increasing CO2
emissions will be minor but beneficial - they may slightly ameliorate the
forecast cooling and more CO2 would help maintain crop yields .9 Warning !! The Solar Cycles 2,3,4 correlation with cycles 21,22,23 would suggest that a Dalton minimum could be imminent. The Livingston and Penn Solar data indicate that a faster drop to the
Maunder Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures might even be on the horizon. If either of these actually occur there would be a much
more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which
may turn out to be a best case scenario.
How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method
doesn't lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical
calculations only provide an apparent rigor for the uninitiated and in relation
to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no
allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up.This is where
scientific judgment comes in - some people are better at pattern recognition
and meaningful correlation than others.A past record of successful forecasting
such as indicated above is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure - say
65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that certainty drops
rapidly.I am sure,however, that it will prove closer to reality than anything put out by the IPCC, Met Office or the NASA group. In any case this is a Bayesian type forecast- in that it can easily be amended on an ongoing basis as the Temperature and Solar data accumulate.

Fig 1 is but one illustration among an ever increasing number, of the growing discrepancy between model outputs and reality.This disconnect has been acknowledged by the establishment science community which is now busy suggesting various epicycle like theories as to where the "missing" heat went.Some say its in the oceans (Trenberth) some say its due to Chinese aerosols (Hansen) but the all main actors still persist in the view that it will appear Lazarus like at some unspecified future time.This is like the Jehovah's witnesses recalculating the end of the world each time a specified doomsday passes.
In Britain , the gulf between the Met Office expectations for the last several years and the actual string of cold and snowy winters and wet summers which has occurred has made the Met Office a laughing stock-
to the point of recently holding a meeting of 25 "experts" to try to figure out where they went wrong.
The answer is simple.Their climate models are incorrectly structured because they are based on three irrational and false assumptions. First that CO2 is the main climate driver ,second that in calculating climate sensitivity the GHE due to water vapour should be added to that of CO2 as a feed back effect and third that the GHE of water vapour is always positive.As to the last point the feedbacks cannot be positive otherwise we wouldn't be here to talk about it .
Further ,Trenberth in a presentation at : http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outreach/proceedings/cdw31_proceedings/S6_05_Kevin_Trenberth_NCAR.ppt
proposes a strong natural negative feedback which has not been included in the IPCC- Met Office models and which independently of all the other evidence would necessarily substantially reduce model warming predictions.
Temperature drives both CO2 and water vapour independently,. The whole CAGW - GHG scare is based on the obvious fallacy of putting the effect before the cause.As a simple (not exact) analogy controlling CO2 levels to control temperature is like trying to lower the temperature of an electric hot plate under a boiling pan of water by capturing and sequestering the steam coming off the top.A corollory to this idea is that the whole idea of a simple climate sensitivity to CO2 is nonsense and the sensitivity equation has no physical meaning unless you already know what the natural controls on energy inputs are already ie the extent of the natural variability.
Furthermore the modelling approach is inherently of no value for predicting future temperature with any calculable certainty because of the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions of a large number of variables with sufficient precision prior to multiple iterations. There is no way of knowing whether the outputs after the parameterisation of the multiple inputs merely hide compensating errors in the system as a whole. The IPCC AR4 WG1 science section actually acknowledges this fact. Section IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which deals with the reliability of the projections.It concludes:
"Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections,consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed"
What could be clearer. The IPCC in 2007 said itself that we don't even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability.- ie we don't know what future temperatures will be and we can't calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2.This also begs a further question of what mere assumptions went into the "plausible" models to be tested anyway.
This quoted statement was necessarily ignored by the editors (censors) who produced the AR4 Summary for Policymakers. Here predictions of disaster were illegitimately given “with high confidence.” in complete contradiction to several sections of the WG1 science section where uncertainties and error bars were discussed. Almost all the worlds politicians, media and eco-activist organisations uncritically accepted and used these predictions as infallible guides to the futrure and acted on these delusions of certainty which are now, six years later ,seen to be just that -delusions.
In summary the projections of the IPCC - Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them really have no useful place in any serious discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money.

2.How To Do Climate Science - Look for Recurring Patterns and Periodicities in the Temperature and Possible Climate Driver Record.

How then can we predict the future of a constantly changing climate?
When,about ten years ago ,I began to look into the CAGW - CO2 based scare, some simple observations presented themselves.

a) Night is colder than day.

b) Winter is colder than summer.

c) It is cooler in the shade than in the sun

d) Temperatures vary more wildly in deserts and hot humid days are more uncomfortable than dry hot days - humidity (enthalpy) might be an important factor.

e) Being a Geologist I knew that the various Milankovic cycles were seen repeatedly in the Geologic record and were the main climate drivers controlling the Quaternary Ice Ages.

f) I also considered whether the current climate was unusually hot or cold. Some knowledge of history brought to mind frost fairs on the Thames and the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum without sunspots during the 17th century . The 300 years of Viking settlements in Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period and viniculture in Britain suggested a warmer world in earlier times than at present while the colder Dark Ages separate the MWP from the Roman Climate optimum.

g)I noted that CO2 was about 0.0375% of the Atmosphere and thought ,correctly as it turns out, that it was highly unlikely that such a little tail should wag such a big dog.

I concluded ,as might any person of reasonable common sense and average intelligence given these simple observations that the sun was the main climate driver . More specific temperature drivers were the number of hours of sunshine,the amount of cloud cover,the humidity and the height of the sun in the sky at midday. It seemed that the present day was likely not much or very little outside the range of climate variability for the last 2000 years and that no government action or policy was required or would be useful with regard to anthropogenic CO2 driven climate change.
These conclusions based on about 15 minutes of anyone's time are much nearer the truth and certainly much more useful as a Guide to Policymakers than the output of the millions of man hours of time and effort that have been spent on IPCC - Met Office models.
The IPCC,academic and governmental climate science industry obviously needed to do more than simply inform the governments of the common sense conclusions seen above in order to keep the grant money flowing and professional opportunities expanding.Certainly the scope ,mechanics, and drivers of climate change are topics of very considerable legitimate scientific interest in their own right but funding would be limited unless catastrophe was forecast.
The IPCC "team" realised correctly that in order to predict the future they needed a good record of past temperatures certainly over at least last 2000 years or so and as much further back as proxy data would allow.Also in order to scare the public and drive policy it was necessary to show that current warm temperatures were out of the range of previous measurements. First they had to do away with Lamb's (and the real world's) Medieval Warming Period which appeared in the first IPCC report. In 1998 and 99 Mann produced the infamous" Hockey Stick" so beloved and exploited by Al Gore. The estblishment modelling community and the ecoleft MSM implicitly or explicitly still appear conceptually locked in to the original Mannian graph although he himself has moved on to a limited extent...A large amount of extremely valuable work has been done in gathering proxy temperature data in the last 15 years. links to some of the most relevant papers are provided athttp://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/01/global-cooling-timing-and-amountnh.htmlThe general principal is to perfom spectral and wavelet analysis on the the temperature and any possibly useful driver associated time series to find any quasicyclic patterns which can be cross correlated. (possibly with appropriate time lags)
For a general review of this approach see several Scafetta papers eghttp://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/scafetta-JSTP2.pdfIn some cases simple inspection of the temperature data is sufficient to detect useful periodicities.
For decadal scale variations a 60 year cycle ,which seems to correlate temperatures and the PDO, is well established. See the post" Global Cooling -Methods and Testable Decadal Predictions" athttp://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com.
Furthermore it is clear that the cosmic ray intensity time series is the best proxy for "solar activity "and that this correlates meaningfully with temperature with perhaps a 10- 12 year lag.
see Fig 3 CD from Steinhilberhttp://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/30/1118965109.full.pdfFig2

Having some passing acquantance with the various temperature time series literature I would suggest that the currently most useful compilation for thinking about the record of the last 2000 years is.
Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdfFig 3

The point of most interest in Fig 3 is the present temperature peak and the MWP peak at 1000 AD which correlate approximately with a solar millenial cycle .The various minima of the Little Ice age and the Dalton minimumof the early 19th century also show up well.
It is not a great stretch of the imagination to propose that the 20th century warming peaked in about 2003 and that that peak was a peak in both the 60 year and 1000 year cycles.On the basis that the sequence from 1000- 2000 may be about to repeat - and also referring to the Oulu cosmic ray related neutron count time series the following climate forecasts may be made .
1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 - 0.15
5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 - 0.5
6 General Conclusion - by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial - they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder
Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent - with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.
For a dicussion of the effects of cooling on future weather patterns see the 30 year Climate Forecast 2 Year update athttp://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2012/07/30-year-climate-forecast-2-year-update.html
How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method doesn't lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigour for the uninitiated and in relation to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up.This is where scientific judgement comes in - some people are better at pattern recognition and meaningful correlation than others.A past record of successful forecasting is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure - say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that, inevitably ,certainty drops rapidly.

THE POLITICS

For the best exposition of the global politics behind the entire AGW scam I refer readers to Donna Laframboise's excellent book The Delinquent Teenager ...... especially pages 41 and 42.

"At an event celebrating the IPCC's 20th anniversary, its chairman gave a speech in which he publicly

acknowledged that the IPCC's primary purpose is not to help governments make wise climate change

decisions. Rather, in his words:

The UNFCCC is our main customer, if I could label them as such, and our interaction with them

enriches the relevance of our work...

UNFCCC stands for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This international

treaty was launched in 1992 at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro. When the chairman of the IPCC

says his organization's main purpose is to assist a UN body that administers a political agreement
between nations - what he's really telling us is that there's no conceivable way the Climate Bible can be

an objective scientific document.............This is a situation in which political operators (UN bureaucrats) pursuing a political goal (a greenhousegas treaty) have recruited scientists to help them achieve their objective"

Most establishment climate modelling scientists in the UK and USA either through scientific incompetence or because of the opportunity to obtain grants and career advancement (and public honours in the case of the UK) have acted as useful idiots to promote the political ends of the UNFCC.

The current state of the poltical climate wars is illuminated by comparing in broad outline the situations in the USA and the UK.

Most politician's primary goal is to gain power by gaining elective office and then stay in power by financially rewarding their corporate contributors or influential friends and interest groups who can deliver votes .This creates a congressional or parliamentary - scientific (when government funded )- military- industrial complex,- which creates for all intents and purposes a national- socialist state.The UN would like to establish a similar world governing bureaucracy.

By regulating greenhouse gas and thus contolling energy supply and demand governments can essentially take over all economic activity and indeed private property without having to go through a nationalisation process.If this seems far fetched one needs look no further than the provisions of the Waxman - Markey bill in the U.S.to see the extent of the power grab which its authors contemplated. Global Warming was used as a pretext to try to grab control of all economic activity in the country because congress would decide the price of all energy via the distribution of carbon credits to whomever contributes most to their campaign funds. Energy production would be diverted to so called "green " sources which are hopelessly uneconomic unless heavily subsidised.If this bill had passed all private real estate would essentially cease to exist because governemnt climate police would ,in the guise of government trained real estate appraisers, decide the appraisal value of all real estate and thus control the sales price of everyone's home. Any alterations or improvements would have to be approved by government inspectors.A vast bureaucracy would be created to run this virtual totalitarian police state run for the benefit of the congress and whichever corporations or special interests pay them the most.

Fortunately, because of the separation of powers in the US constitution this disaster was temporarily averted.

However aided by the worst Supreme Court decision in history which effectively transferred total control of the economy to the Executive branch via the EPA, the Obama administration is planning to achieve the Orwellian objectives of the Waxman Markey bill by the piecemeal regulation of GHG emissions using fear of global warming as a tool to carry the public with him.

Britain by contrast ,having replaced a powerful king by an equally all powerful prime minister and small cabal of ministers had no constitutional barriers to a power grab by the nomenclatura for the benefit of themselves and their corporate and land owning friends.The GHG scare promoted by the fellow travelling ecoleft press and especially by the BBC propaganda machine enabled successive governments to first, in 2008, pass ,with only four dissenting votes, a climate bill which by law established legal requirments for draconian CO2 emission limits.As I write this, the House of Lords is debating an energy bill ,already approved by the Commons ,by which the government would run the economy with detailed control of energy supply and demand via a Russian Communist style central planning sytem where energy sources and demand and prices are decreed by the Secretary of State and a supposedly all knowing government bureaucracy.The majority of Britains political leadership retains its impenetratable ignorance of the significance of the fact that there has been no warming since 1997 with CO2 up 8% and retains its unshakeable faith in the delusionary CAGW religion. During the debate the "fact" of CAGW was hardly questioned. The chief discussion was about how to attract investment in inherently uneconomic renewables such as windmills by rigging the market by subsidy and regulation.

When this literally lunatic bill is finally passed into law Britain will be firmly set on course for economic disaster.

In the U.S.A the battle is about to commence in earnest.In Britain the ongoing collapse of the CAGW delusion amongst the scientists made no difference to the discussion. I see no evidence that either Obama and his hand picked true believers in the CAGW religion or the Democratic Congressional leadership will be any more influenced by the changing science than their British counterparts.With the Supreme Court decision behind them can the EPA be stopped? We'll see.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Dear Professor Belcher
There has been no net warming since 1997 with CO2 up over 8%, The warming trend peaked in about 2003 and the earth has been cooling slightly for the last 10 years . This cooling will last for at least 20 years and perhaps for hundreds of years beyond that.. The Met office and IPCC climate models and all the impact studies depending on them are totally useless because they are incorrectly structured. The models are founded on two irrationally absurd assumptions.First that CO2 is the main driver - when CO2 follows temperature .The cause does not follow the effect. Second piling stupidity on irrationality the models add the water vapour as a feed back to the CO2 in order to get a climate sensitivity of about 3 degrees. Water vapour follows temperature independently of CO2 and is the main GHG.
Furthermore apart from the specific problems in the Met- IPCC models ,models are inherently useless for predicting temperatures because of the difficulty of setting the initial parameters with sufficient precision.Why you think you can iterate more than a couple of weeks ahead is beyond my comprehension.After all you gave up on seasonal forecasts.
For a discussion of the right way to approach forecasting seehttp://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/05/climate-forecasting-basics-for-britains.html
and several other pertinent posts also on http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com.
Here is a summary of the conclusions.
"It is not a great stretch of the imagination to propose that the 20th century warming peaked in about 2003 and that that peak was a peak in both the 60 year and 1000 year cycles.On that basis the conclusions of the post referred to above were as follows.
1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 - 0.15
5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 - 0.5
6 General Conclusion - by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial - they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder
Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent - with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.

For a dicussion of the effects of cooling on future weather patterns see the 30 year Climate Forecast 2 Year update athttp://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2012/07/30-year-climate-forecast-2-year-update.html
How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method doesn't lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigour for the uninitiated and in relation to the climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up.This is where scientific judgement comes in - some people are better at pattern recognition than others.A past record of successful forecasting is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure - say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that, inevitably ,certainty drops."
It is way past time for someone in the British scientific establishment to forthrightly say to the government that the whole CO2 scare is based on a mass delusion and try to stop Britain's lunatic efforts to control climate by installing windmills.
As an expat Brit I watch with fascinated horror as y'all head lemming like over a cliff. I would be very happy to consult for the Met on this matter- you certainly need to hear a forthright skeptic presentation to reconnect with reality.
Best Regards Norman Page.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Most climate warming alarmists have recently realised that it is now counterproductive to attribute every and all extreme weather events ( even cold snowy winters) to global warming and try to project a judicious objectivity by applying the cliche "weather isn't climate" to both sides of the climate wars. In fact weather is an almost instantaneous slice through the climate space- time phase space and certain patterns will occur more frequently on a cooling rather than a warming world.Here I will deal in the main with the USA because each region will interact with the warming or cooling changes in the great ocean and atmospheric current systems according to its particular topography and geography.
The basic principles are very simple. On a cooler earth the temperature gradient from the tropics to the arctic circle is steeper.This creates instability and the jet stream swings further North and South as opposed to its more West - East path during warmer periods.According to the season ,blocking highs may develop with colder dryer air penetrating further South and warm moist air reaching further North. There can be enormous temperature and humidity contrasts in the narrow boundary between these masses as warm air is sucked in from the Gulf . Conditions alomg such a boundary are ideal for developing the wind shear necessary for the tornado swarm development seen recently in Oklahoma.The blocking highs also push hurricanes to the east so that hurricanes like Sandy are more likely to occur.Note that Sandy was not a powerful Hurricane in fact it came ashore as a tropical storm. The big storm surge was the result of its long path over open water while a real cooling signal was seen in the development of blizzard conditions in the NW quadrant.This classic weather pattern is shown for today 6/02/13 in Figs 1 and 2 and occurs more often during a cooling phase of the PDO and is often triggered by an E Pacific La Nina cooling. as seen in the 6/01/13 SST anomaly map Fig 3
(TOH to The Weather Channel) It is worth noting that the pattern seen in Fig 1 is also ideal for steering any Atlantic Hurricane which develops this season in a Sandy type direction.
Fig1

Fig2

Fig3

By contrast on a warmer world tropical SSTs are higher EL Ninos more common and more powerful category 4 and 5 hurricanes eg Katrina and Gilbert can develop .Their path is more E- W so that they more frequently hit the Gulf Coast or even Central America.

More generally- a cooling earth is a dryer earth because the winds pick up less water vapour from the cooler oceans.In the USA the cool waters off the West Coast (fig3) will lead to more generalised droughts in the Center , West and SW and when combined with more frequent late and early frosts and snows food crop production will be threatened .What rains do come will paradoxically come from storms leading to flash flooding further restricting food production.In California itself the south will be dryer with more forest fires while in the North more of the rains will come as snow so that increasing snow pack will ameliorate the overall dryer conditions.
Most of the ideas expressed above were included in the post ""30 Years Climate Forecast" in June 2010 on my blog at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com. and revisited in June 2012 in the post "30 Year Climate Forecast -2 year update."
There has been no net warming since 1997 with CO2 up over 8%. The SSTs show a cooling trend since 2003.
The problem with the IPCC- MetOffice Climate models is that, apart from the egregious structural errors in the specific models, (assuming that CO2 is the main driver when it clearly follows temperature and adding water vapour as a feedback onto CO2 to increase the sensitivity) climate science is so complex that the modelling approach is inherently incapable of providing useful forecasts for several reasons -for starters the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions with sufficient precision. All the IPCC model projections and the impact studies and government policies which depend on them are a total waste of time and money. The only useful approach is to perform power spectrum and wavelet analysis on the temperature and possible climate driver time series to find patterns of repeating periodicities and project them forward. When this is done it is apparent that the earth entered a cooling phase in 2003-4 which will likely last for 20 more years and perhaps for several hundred years beyond that. For the data and references supporting this conclusion check the post “Climate Forecasting Basics for Britains Seven Alarmist Scientists” and several earlier posts on Climate Forecasting and Global Cooling especially "Global Cooling - Climate and Weather Forecasting" from 11/18/13.
Here is a summary of the latest forecast based not on the particular events referred to above but on the data and references linked in the series of posts on the climatesense-norpag site.

"It is not a great stretch of the imagination to propose that the 20th century warming peaked in about 2003 and that that peak was a peak in both the 60 year and 1000 year cycles.On that basis the conclusions of the posts referred to above were as follows.
1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22.
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 - 0.15
5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 - 0.5
6 General Conclusion - by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial - they may slightly ameliorate the forecast
cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder
Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent - with a much more rapid and economically disruptive
cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario"

How confident should one be in these predictions? The pattern method doesn't lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigour for the uninitiated and in relation to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up.This is where scientific judgement comes in - some people are better at pattern recognition than others.A past record of successful forecasting is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure - say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that, inevitably ,certainty must drop.